Life is interconnected and so are the topics on this blog. It might be cooking and gardening one day, yoga the next, knitting and sewing, or hiking and then bird watching followed by recycling or composting. They are the parts that bring humble joy to my life of voluntary simplicity in Montana.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

52 Weeks of Reading - February

Somehow another month has flown by. I am still ahead in my 52-Books-in-52-Weeks reading challenge. I managed six 200+ page books this month.February 1st-7th:
*Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls: Essays, Etc. by David Sedaris
*Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun

February 8th-14th:
*How We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph Hallinan

February 15th-21st:
*Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

February 22nd-28th:
*The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
*Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

My favorite book is harder to pin down this month. Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls was funny enough to make me laugh out loud. A lot of things are funny. It is another level when it is laugh-out-loud funny. Plus, I mean, how could I not love that title. How We Make Mistakes was highly interesting. I am not sure I will make less mistakes now, but it was superbly interesting and well cited. Man, people do studies on just about everything! The Sound and the Fury was challenging, but profound. The chapter narrated by a mentally disabled person was written in what I can only perceive to be a very authentic style. I think I like this Faulkner, but since they're challenging to read I am not sure why. Maybe I like the challenge. Cat's Cradle was a revisit for me, Kurt Vonnegut being my favorite author and all. I'd not read it in years. It was just as fantastic as I remembered. I love the invented religion--Bokononism. Ice-9 is a terrifying concept though.

Traffic was pretty good, but also not exactly heartening. I don't like driving. Matt was surprised I was reading it. My biggest take-away was that a crazy number of people die or are seriously injured in car accidents every day. And yet we do not, as a society, clamor on about ways to address the problem the way we do for terrorist attacks or plane crashes, which statistically kill much fewer people. We seem to have accepted that people will die in cars, that its an acceptable risk. I don't think so. Also, self-driving robot cars are real. I guess I didn't know that.

My least favorite book was Give Me Everything You Have. It wasn't that compelling or relate-able to me. I guess it is a good cautionary tale for adult safety on the internet. So much attention is paid to teen cyber bullying, but I'd never really considered adult cyber bullies. Still, I wouldn't recommend it readily.

Weeks passed: 8
Books read: 12

Books read for this challenge in the month of January can be found here.